


Tachycardia

by taewho



Category: BioShock
Genre: Rapture (Bioshock)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-22
Updated: 2016-01-22
Packaged: 2018-05-15 11:58:49
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 579
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5784520
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taewho/pseuds/taewho
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Jack stares death in the mouth (and it’s less frightening than the damp walls around him, and he thinks that Rapture was a tomb from the very beginning.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Tachycardia

**Author's Note:**

> On the scale of heartbreaking betrayals I think Atlas will always be my #1 but Kylo Ren is really force-choking my emotions tbh.
> 
> *Edit: NEVERMIND THOSE TWO--TALK TO ME ABOUT SOLAS.

The horrifying numbness of the splicers is easier for Jack to handle than the cracked character that is Dr. Steinman. They're farther from their humanity, never as coherent as the doctor, and Jack wonders if Steinman would be easier to handle if he wasn't. They're little more than their ADAM and their hatred for Jack because down there, _he_  is the foreign one.  He's alarmingly whole where they are broken, he can still be injured, there's still a lot of him left to be taken and all they want to do is

_take_

_take_

_take._

Them, Jack can stop. He doesn't fear them. But the doctor?

Steinman scares the living shit out of Jack. Jack can't ignore his messages scrawled in blood on the floor, on the walls--like Rapture hasn't bled enough. Jack sees the words, the images, when he closes his eyes and he wishes he could burn them from his memory. He sees spliced up women who just can't, _won't_ be perfect enough for the doctor and he can hear Steinman laughing, hear him sawing away at the women like the images of him doing so saw away at Jack's sanity.

Limb by limb.

Jack can't take that.

He hasn't prepared for this, he hasn't prepared for Rapture entirely, but _this_ is something else.

This isn't the bubbling cacophony of voices calling out to God as if their faith hasn't yet drowned. This isn't the anxiety of not knowing what lurks beyond every waterlogged hallway. It isn't Atlas's voice on the radio guiding him, saving him, leading him both in and out of danger, or cryptic messages from the man whose vision had come crumbling down around him, as if his own foundation hadn't been to blame. It isn't the pain, sharp and quick and fast to heal but slow to fade, the bloodstains on Jack's sweater never dark enough for the splicers. 

It isn't the desperate, shrill cries of a Little Sister who doesn't know she needs rescuing.

Jack doesn't know what this is, what Steinman is. He doesn't understand why he is afraid.

Countless times, Jack stares death in the mouth (and it’s less frightening than the damp walls around him, and he thinks that Rapture was a tomb from the very beginning). But when he's down in the Medical Pavilion, he shivers for reasons greater than his inability to stay dry and the blood he is covered with is never his own. There isn't a voice on any radio that can bring him back the mental hell Steinman leads Jack through, but Jack commends Atlas for trying.

Maybe he's afraid because he knows Rapture  couldn't have ended up any other way--and Andrew Ryan had said it himself, that it was impossible to build it anywhere else.

And Jack doesn't know anything else, doesn't know anything outside of his passport on the plane and a gun and a fire, the moon reflecting in the flames dancing along the water. He doesn't know anything but Rapture's crying walls and his friend on the radio. But he knows that the city was never meant to succeed, an impossible task almost accomplished.

Almost.

Almost. And who is Jack in a world where something like that can happen? 

Jack's not afraid of dying. But maybe Steinman scares him because when Jack kills him, he knows he'll leave that part of him behind that believes death would release him from that wretched city, because hell couldn't be worse.


End file.
